1) What year was your paternal grandfather born? Divide this number by 100 and round the number off to a whole number. This is your “roulette number.”

2) Use your pedigree charts or your family tree genealogy software program to find the person with that number in your ancestral name list (some people call it an “ahnentafel”). Who is that person?

3) Tell us three facts about that person in your ancestral name list with the “roulette number.”

4) Write about it in a blog post on your own blog, in a Facebook status or a Google Stream post, or as a comment on this blog post.

5) If you do not have a person’s name for your “roulette number” then spin the wheel again – pick a grandmother, or yourself, a parent, a favorite aunt or cousin, or even your children!

My paternal grandfather was born in 1873 and so my roulette number is 19. That is my great-great grandmother, Sarah C. I think that the ‘C’ might stand for Champ — her daughter’s middle name was Champ.

Here are three facts about Sarah:

1) She was married to George Ferris.

2) She was born around 1821 in England. She and George eventually made their way to Iowa.

3) It appears that Sarah and George adopted a son — the 1880 census shows them with three children at home and one is denoted as “Adopt Son.” I’ve never seen such a notation before.

Dear Reader: Do you think you are related to the individuals listed in this post? Please drop me a note! I love hearing from cousins and others researching my family!

Not too long ago, I requested my paternal grandfather’s military service record from NARA. This may seem silly to those who know where I live and work, but I’m an impatient soul and wasn’t willing to wait for records that I wouldn’t have had the time to search out myself for months and months.

My grandfather served during the Spanish-American War in the Iowa Infantry. The CD containing his records arrived from College Park today and revealed new details about my grandfather as a young man.

The image above is from my grandfather’s military service record (his name has been cropped out for privacy/security purposes). Several things are revealed here. I knew my grandfather was a physician later in his life, but this card shows that he was working in insurance when he was 24.

This card also gives his residence as Grinnell, Iowa, in 1898. The name of this town is new to me and apparently his father also lived there at the time. In 1890, they were living in Morning Sun, Iowa, about 120 miles away. By the 1900 census, my grandfather is in Philadelphia (at medical school) and my great-grandparents also had moved to still another town in Iowa.

So now I have a new area in which to search for records of my Corley ancestors out in the Midwest. It looks like the Grinnell Public Library will be a good place to start.

Other details revealed elsewhere in the service record include the fact that my grandfather spent a lot of time working in the recruitment office. He eventually was promoted to the rank of corporal. One discrepancy I noticed is that his place of birth is not what I have found documented elsewhere.

Next steps include resolving that birthplace discrepancy and accessing the pension application my eventually widowed grandmother filed. Interestingly enough, it was filed under the Civil War pension system.

I have posted the various surnames I am investigating on Twitter on a few different Surname Saturdays. Today, I decided to be a bit more proactive and seek out others investigating the same lines. Today’s post will be about what I discovered about the CORLEY line in Virginia, where we can be traced back to the 1600s, Illinois and Iowa.

I tried some searches on Twitter specifically and didn’t find anyone else looking for Corley line information, but there sure are a ton of other Corleys of various ilks on Twitter!

I’ve been avoiding searches on Google lately now that I’m subscribing to several genealogy databases/services and because Google can often send you on a wild goose chase. Still, there are juicy tidbits to be found if you’re patient and know what to look for. The following are what I found via basic Google searches combining the family name, place names and sometimes the word ‘genealogy’ to help narrow results.

CORLEY (Virginia)
I rediscovered the Corley winery, to which I am assured I am related by other Corleys. Their site even refers to my immigrant ancestor, Richard Corley the Immigrant. I haven’t been to California to try the wine and have never seen it in stores out this way. There’s another Corley vineyard in Colorado, but I’ve never heard that we’re related to that one…